


On Leave (The World Keeps Spinning)

by Evandar



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Background Original Characters - Freeform, Gen, Post-Movie(s), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 20:51:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1525226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evandar/pseuds/Evandar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maria Hill is not unaffected by the battle in New York (though she wishes she was). Being on leave is more of a challenge these days; she just can't believe that the world keeps spinning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Leave (The World Keeps Spinning)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Flamebyrd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flamebyrd/gifts).



> Thank you to S for the beta.
> 
> I didn't originally sign up to write MCU for this challenge for some reason, but when I saw your prompt for Maria Hill I just couldn't resist. The thought of what she'd be like outside of work - what kind of family she had; what they did; what they thought of her - fascinated me. So this is it! Maria goes shopping (kind of). I really hope that you like it.

It’s an effort to be normal sometimes. People – her sister tells her – don’t walk like they have steel in their spine or look at others like they can dissect their every thought. People don’t wear their hair in the same, severe style all the time so that they don’t give potential assailants something to grab onto, or choose their footwear specifically for its practicality when running or shattering someone’s kneecap. People don’t take guns grocery shopping; Maria Hill does.

In her defence, it’s a new development. Since New York, she hasn’t felt safe, and her gun is a security blanket that she can strip down, clean and rebuild every night and keep under her pillow to ward away the nightmares. It’s not because of the aliens, either. When the portal closed, so did their chance of an immediate regroup and a second attack – they can _prepare_ for the aliens – the World Security Council, on the other hand, is very much _here_.

So yeah, she keeps her gun in a holster in the small of her back, hidden under her jacket. She knows it’ll do nothing against a nuke; it’s just for her. She imagines it’s much the same for the other people she sees – servicemen and women, for the most part – who do the same. It’s a weight that keeps her sane on her days off when she browses supermarket aisles and has coffee with her sister, who has somehow managed to be one of those people who saw the missile on TV and thought that it was for the Chitauri all along.

Maria doesn’t correct her when that comes up. She sips her cappuccino instead and licks the froth from her lip, and watches Kate’s hands flutter through the air as she gushes about how brave IronMan was (and that’s something she can’t correct, anyway, because for all his faults, Stark _was_ ). Some things are meant to be secret, after all, even if a lot of people have been figuring it out for themselves.

“I can’t believe you got to meet them,” Kate says.

One of the secrets is just how close to the top Maria is. The less people who know that, the safer she is (though she doesn’t lie to herself and pretend that SHIELD’s security is infallible; Stark, again) and the safer her naïve big sister is, and their parents and brother and whoever he’s dating. There’s a big, extended network of people who can be used against her, and she pretends that the thought doesn’t terrify the life out her.

“They’re just people,” she says, which is…true, actually.

Maria’s so used to lying – so used to secrets and covert operations and immediate danger – that this whole thing feels like an act in a play. The shopping trip, the coffee, and the dinner they’ll cook for their parents later. Their brother’s latest girlfriend will enter stage left and bring a script-worth of ‘when will you find a man Maria?’ questions that have been rehearsed to the point of tears. Then she will exit, stage right, and the play will continue without her: its delicate choreography spinning on unaware of threats beyond what’s reported on CNN.

She sips her coffee again and blames it for the bitterness on her tongue.

…

After dinner, she gets Kate to drop her off by the store again on her way back to her apartment. Without her sister’s chatter, shopping is less surreal. She can focus on the necessities she didn’t pick up earlier: her favourite granola bars (too boring), a carton of frozen yoghurt (well, at least it’s low fat), and a small bottle of dark rum (why are you drinking?). She grabs a bag of coffee grinds for the morning, and a box of tampons because she knows her stash on the helicarrier is running low and heads to the checkout where she stands behind an elderly man who carefully counts out every cent and dime for his paper cup of joe.

When someone steps behind her, she shifts her basket so that her gun hand is free. Call her paranoid, but… of course she is. She can’t not be, anymore. Her choreography is set to a tune played by a band of _people_ who think that the lives of millions is an acceptable sacrifice and while no one here _knows_ that – not the old man, not the pimply kid at the counter, and not the guy on the phone to his wife behind her (who smells of perfume that she’d bet doesn’t belong to the woman he’s talking to) – part of her thinks that something has to happen. The other shoe has to drop. The world can’t just continue like this.

(That’s why I’m drinking, Mom. That’s why I’m going home and curling up with my rum and my raspberry ripple and a goddamn _Disney_ movie; that’s why I carry a gun, Kate, and why I take it to bed with me. Why can’t any of you see that everything’s wrong?)

Paranoid, but fearless, she walks home and relishes every breath she takes. The air is filled with the smell of pizza and Chinese food; vomit and cigarette smoke and piss. The buildings tower over her, dark and glittering and whole, and the streetlights flicker. The homeless beg for change next to alleys no one would pull out a wallet near, and she spies the occasional rat skulking and skittering through the overspill from dumpsters.

The city is alive. Damaged further in, close to the Stark Tower, but alive. The cheap, run-down neighbourhood she lives in is the same as it’s always been. _Alive_.

That she is grateful – achingly, heart-shatteringly _grateful_ \- for a lack of nuclear waste and ash makes her stomach twist and tears burn behind her eyes. She blinks them back. She won’t – can’t – let them fall or she knows she’ll never stop, and she’s no good to anyone like that. She walks on, gripping her carrier bags a little tighter, and puts the steel back into her spine.

By the time she gets to the door of her building, she’s marching. Her gun hand is ready to draw and her jaw is set like concrete. Her anger at everything – at Loki, at Loki’s family, at the Chitauri, at the Tesseract, (and especially) at the Council – has burned away her potential tears and cooled to form a shell. A protective cocoon in which the girl she used to be can curl up, safe and unscathed.

She changes into pyjamas, strips and cleans her gun and sets it on the coffee table next to the good Captain Morgan, and curls up with her frozen yoghurt and a spoon. She sleeps on her sofa like she has done every night she’s been on leave, and she’ll rise with the sun to run off the night’s excess past the spot where they packed Loki off to Asgard.

And she’ll brush away the salty tracks on her cheeks like they were never there.


End file.
